Epiglottis

"Epiglottitis is a medical emergency that may result in death if not treated quickly."  This is the first sentence in the illness that the doctor mentioned about Case when I took him today.  I'm SO glad I didn't use my Google MD to look at Case's symptoms before I went to the doctor because I probably would have been in an all out panic.  


Before anyone else starts panicking... he is fine.  Monday night he woke up in the middle of the night screaming and trembling.  He was sweaty and seemed SO scared.  I thought he'd just had a bad dream.  After a restless night of sleep he woke up Tuesday morning with a fever.  It got as high as 101.9 (rectally... yeah... I'm that mom that demands accuracy when it comes to fevers and still finds it necessary to pin my almost two year old down for a rectal temperature reading).  He started drooling.  Now let me clarify that Case has never outgrown drooling... I hope that one day he will learn to close his mouth when swallowing, otherwise mommy's dreams of his future as a surgeon are probably out.  So he is a drooler... especially when he is really concentrating or teething but the drool that was literally pouring out of his mouth today was NOT normal.  

Right???  You can even see it pouring out!

There were times today where it was covered from the neck to seam at the bottom of the shirt.  I thought I was going to have to get scuba gear for the poor Paul Frank Monkey on his shirt.  I treated his fever until 3 this morning and when he woke up at 7:00 it seemed to be gone.  He was obviously not feeling well though.  He would all of a sudden just start sobbing for reasons that took me a while to calculate.  I finally figured out (post doctor's visit of course) that his throat was for sure hurting.  I had suspected it all along but wasn't sure. 


 I took him to the doctor. After the nurse passed on the screening notes he came it and his first words were "how's his breathing?"  Ummm... well so far that was one thing I hadn't worried about but I went ahead and added it to the list.  Since his breathing sounded fine (even when the doctor took him and purposely got him upset to listen to his breathing when he was under stress), and he didn't look like a kid that was so sick he needed to go to the hospital, he said he thought it was nothing more than a virus.  At first he wasn't going to treat him but then we discussed it further and he explained his concern... Epiglottitis, he decided to go ahead and do a round of meds.  Now he didn't go into detail on how serious this could be but I gathered that it was not something you want to sign your kid up for.  By the end of the appointment he told me he was going to give him a week on antibiotics (sidenote... he clearly picked the most expensive ones he could find at $50 after insurance... it also didn't help that I was buying one of everything from the toy aisle in hopes that it would make him feel better) and told me to watch his breathing.  


We've since researched this illness a little further and I don't think he has it but you can bet I'll be making hourly visits to his room tonight to listen to his breathing.  I am confident that there is a sore throat though because he's been chugging water all day (of course he's thirsty since he's wearing most of the liquid in his body) but when he took a sip of juice on two different occasions today he started sobbing again.  Juice burns... water doesn't.  Now beyond all that he's been acting fussy but still playing.  I'm wondering if it isn't strep or something like that but the doc didn't look in his throat (remember this wasn't a symptom I was confident of until we got home) so if he is worse tomorrow I will give them a call and update the symptom list.  Either way this antibiotic should treat whatever it is.  So I'm just praying (please go ahead and jump on this bandwagon with me) that there are no new symptoms, especially the scary ones, that the antibiotics kick this quickly, and that no one else catches it, especially Ty and our visitors yesterday.


What a day!  So grateful for my boys tonight and for my mom who left work so I could leave Ty with her and then stayed all afternoon to help!!!